Duelfer says insurgents may use such weapons on U.S. troops
The recent discovery of two chemical artillery shells in Iraq has raised concerns among weapons inspectors that other shells may turn up in the hands of insurgents battling American troops, the head of the U.S. search team said Wednesday.
"We need to investigate whether there are more where that came from, wherever that is, and we need to make certain that they're not finding their way into anti-coalition or terrorist hands," said Charles Duelfer, head of the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group, in an interview via satellite from Baghdad.
That's a bizarre scenario for a country that the media says has neither WMDs nor terrorists.
Laboratory tests of an artillery shell used in a May roadside bomb in the Baghdad area confirmed the presence of the nerve agent sarin, and a shell found two weeks before then contained the decayed residue of mustard gas.
Before the conflict, Iraqi officials told U.N. weapons inspectors that they had destroyed the country's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
The Iraq Survey Group reported last fall that it had found evidence of weapons research that Iraqis had concealed from U.N. inspectors.
But Duelfer's predecessor, David Kay, predicted in January that no large stockpiles of banned weapons would be found.
Duelfer said he did not think that chemical shells would be found in the thousands. But given the number of weapons Iraq was unable to account for after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, he said it is likely that others will turn up.
Just out of curiosity, how many shells = a stockpile?
He declined to discuss whether any evidence suggested that insurgents such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi have linked up with former Iraqi weapons technicians. U.S. officials have said that al-Zarqawi has links to al Qaeda and that he has claimed responsibility for a string of attacks on U.S. troops, Iraqis and others.
Iraq used chemical weapons in its 1980-88 war with Iran and to put down a Kurdish uprising against Saddam in 1988. Baghdad admitted to the United Nations in 1990 that it had built some artillery shells to carry sarin -- prototypes that it insisted had all been destroyed during testing.
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Duelfer said he hopes to present a full report within the next few months. He denied the search is a wild goose chase, as some critics have suggested.
"A wild goose chase is when you're looking for something that may not exist," he said. "We're looking for something that does exist, and that is the truth. You know I wasn't sent here to find weapons of mass destruction. I was sent out here to find the truth about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs."
Ok... so who IS looking for them?